Pacific Crest Trail: Northern California. Jeffrey P. Schaffer

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СКАЧАТЬ Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, abbreviated as the PCNST. However, this abbreviation is more cumbersome, and essentially no one uses it.)

      Hazard says that on that very night, he conveyed Miss Montgomery’s suggestion to the Mt. Baker Club of Bellingham, which was enthusiastic about it. He says that soon a number of other mountain clubs and outdoor organizations in the Pacific Northwest adopted the idea and set about promoting it. Then, in 1928, Fred W. Cleator became Supervisor of Recreation for Region 6 (Oregon and Washington) of the US Forest Service. Cleator proclaimed and began to develop the Cascade Crest Trail, a route down the spine of Washington from Canada to the Columbia River. Later, he extended the Oregon Skyline Trail at both ends so that it too traversed a whole state. In 1937 Region 6 of the Forest Service developed a design for PCT trail markers and posted them from the Canadian border to the California border.

      But the Forest Service’s Region 5 (California) did not follow this lead, and it remained for a private person to provide the real spark not only for a California segment of the PCT but indeed for the PCT itself. In the early 1930s the idea of a Pacific Crest Trail entered the mind of Clinton C. Clarke of Pasadena, California, who was then chairman of the Executive Committee of the Mountain League of Los Angeles County. “In March 1932,” wrote Clarke in The Pacific Crest Trailway, he “proposed to the United States Forest and National Park services the project of a continuous wilderness trail across the United States from Canada to Mexico….The plan was to build a trail along the summit divides of the mountain ranges of these states, traversing the best scenic areas and maintaining an absolute wilderness character.”

      The proposal included formation of additional Mountain Leagues in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco by representatives of youth organizations and hiking and mountaineering clubs similar to the one in Los Angeles. These Mountain Leagues would then take the lead in promoting the extension of the John Muir Trail northward and southward to complete a pathway from border to border. When it became evident that more than Mountain Leagues were needed for such a major undertaking, Clarke took the lead in forming the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference, with representatives from the three Pacific Coast states. He served as its President for 25 years.

      As early as January 1935 Clarke published a handbook-guide to the PCT giving the route in rather sketchy terms (“the Trail goes east of Heart Lake, then south across granite fields to the junction of Piute and Evolution Creeks”—this covers about nine miles).

      In the summer of 1935—and again the next three summers—groups of boys under the sponsorship of the YMCA explored the PCT route in relays, proceeding from Mexico on June 15, 1935, to Canada on August 12, 1938. This exploration was under the guidance of a YMCA secretary, Warren L. Rogers, who served as Executive Secretary of the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference from 1932 until 1957, when Clarke died (at age 84), and the conference disappeared. (Rogers was an enthusiastic hiker—and mountaineer—which is remarkable considering that he limped because as a child he had been stricken with polio.) On his own, Rogers more or less kept the idea of the PCT alive until hiking and trails were receiving national attention in the Sixties. He stayed active in promoting the trail and its joys almost to the time of his death in 1992 (at age 83).

      National Trail System

      In 1965 the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a federal agency, appointed a commission to make a nationwide trails study. The commission, noting that walking for pleasure was second only to driving for pleasure as the most popular recreation in America, recommended establishing a national system of trails of two kinds—long National Scenic Trails in the hinterlands and shorter National Recreation Trails in and near metropolitan areas. The commission recommended that Congress establish four Scenic Trails—the already existing Appalachian Trail, the partly existing Pacific Crest Trail, a Potomac Heritage Trail and a Continental Divide Trail. Congress responded by passing, in 1968, the National Trails System Act, which set the framework for a system of trails and specifically made the Appalachian and the Pacific Crest trails the first two National Scenic trails.

      The Proposed Route

      Meanwhile, in California, the Forest Service in 1965 had held a series of meetings about a route for the PCT in the state. These meetings involved people from the Forest Service, the Park Service, the State Division of Parks and Beaches, and other government bodies charged with responsibility over areas where the trail might go. These people decided that so much time had elapsed since Clarke had drawn his route that they should essentially start all over. Of course, it was pretty obvious that segments like the John Muir Trail would not be overlooked in choosing a new route through California. By the end of 1965 a proposed route had been drawn onto maps. (We don’t say “mapped,” for that would imply that someone actually had covered the route in the field.)

      When Congress, in the 1968 law, created a citizens Advisory Council for the PCT, it was the route devised in 1965 which the Forest Service presented to the council as a “first draft” of a final PCT route. This body of citizens was to decide all the details of the final route; the Forest Service said it would adopt whatever the citizens wanted. The Advisory Council was also to concern itself with standards for the physical nature of the trail, markers to be erected along the trail, and the administration of the trail and its use.

      In 1972 the Advisory Council agreed upon a route, and the Forest Service put it onto maps for internal use. Since much of the agreed-upon route was cross-country, these maps were sent to the various national forests along the route, for them to mark a temporary route in the places where no trail existed along the final PCT route. This they did—but not always after field work. The result was that the maps made available to the public in June 1972 showing the final proposed route and the temporary detours did not correspond to what was on the ground in many places. A common flaw was that the Forest Service showed a temporary or permanent PCT segment following a trail taken from a pre-existing Forest Service map, when in fact there was no trail where it was shown on that map in the first place.

      Perfect or not, the final proposed route was sent to Washington for publication in the Federal Register, the next step toward its becoming official. A verbal description of the route was also published in the Federal Register on January 30, 1973. But the material in the register did not give a precise route which could be unambiguously followed; it was only a general route, and the details in many places remained to be settled.

      Private Property Glitches

      As construction on PCT trail segments began, many hikers were optimistic that the entire trail could be completed within a decade. Perhaps it could have, if it weren’t for private property located along the proposed route. While some owners readily allowed rights-of-way, many others did not, at least initially, and years of negotiations passed before some rights were finally secured. While negotiations were in progress, the Forest Service sometimes built new trail segments on both sides of a parcel of private land, expecting to extend a trail segment through it soon after. At times this approach backfired, such as in the northern Sierra Nevada in the Gibraltar environs (Map M3 in this book). The owners of some property never gave up a right-of-way, and so a new stretch of trail on Gibraltar’s south slopes was abandoned for a snowier, costlier stretch on its north slopes, completed in fall 1985. But at least the stretch was built, which was not true for a short stretch northwest of Sierra Buttes (Map M1, Section 7), where the PCT route is a road.

      PCT logo

      The major obstacle to the trail’s completion had been the mammoth Tejon Ranch, which began in Civil War days as a sheep ranch, then later became a cattle ranch, and in 1936 became a public corporation that diversified its land use and increased its acreage. This “ranch,” about the size of Sequoia National Park, straddles most of the Tehachapi Mountains. An agreement between the ranch’s owners and government representatives finally was reached, and in 1993 this section of the PCT was completed. However, rather than traversing the length СКАЧАТЬ